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Published January 26, 2017
This is a rush transcript from "Your World," September 11, 2012. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
NEIL CAVUTO, HOST OF "YOUR WORLD": All right, talk about weird timing, and this one pretty close to home.
Just south of the border, we are getting reports now that Mexican authorities have arrested three alleged Hezbollah members, one of whom is an American citizen. The news coming as America marks of course the anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
Count Joe Lieberman worried.
Senator, what do you make of this?
SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN, I-CONN.: Well, I don't have -- have confirmation that its -- I haven't heard it from the U.S. government directly, but I'm not surprised by this, because, look, just a year or so ago, we have evidence that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was trying to work through a Mexican drug cartel to send somebody into Washington to assassinate the ambassador from Saudi Arabia to Washington.
This all goes back to Iran. Hezbollah was created by the Iranian regime. They're now spreading out across the globe in ways that they didn't do up until about a year or two ago. They were just around Lebanon and working against Israel. So this seems very credible to me.
I'm grateful to the Mexican authorities for grabbing these guys and turning one of them who's an American apparently over to U.S. authorities.
CAVUTO: You know what people worry about, Senator? I know you were ahead of the curve on this, this idea that we might have made it harder for bad guys to get here through the legal means or the way that all the 9/11 hijackers did, but we still haven't cleared up this border issue where they cannot easily, but certainly with a lot less difficulty get here via Mexico. Right?
LIEBERMAN: Yeah Neil, you are absolutely right. This is something I have been worried about for a long time, because obviously a lot of people cross the border from Mexico illegally, mostly for purposes of coming to America to get a job.
But the drug cartels and the so-called coyotes who hold up people to take them over the border are pretty good at evading our defenses, even though they've improved. And to me, it's been a major worry, which we are trying in our way to defend against, that the terrorists would use the Mexican border and not any of the normal points of entry, which are really hardened now to get into America and do us damage.
And of course I worry that these Hezbollah-related people who were apprehended in Mexico had exactly that in mind.
CAVUTO: Well, they're a long way from home.
LIEBERMAN: They're a long way from home. And it shows us 11 years after 9/11 that though we have really decimated Al Qaeda central, that there are still other Al Qaeda cells around the world that are mostly self-generated, but the number one source of terrorist activity is Iran. And it's spreading out across the globe close to our homes. So we got to focus on it.
CAVUTO: Well, speaking of that region, then, senator, you have heard these reports that the president has passed up a meeting with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu during the U.N. General Assembly next month, and a lot of people have said that's another slap in the face.
We're getting sort of different accounts of this. Bottom line, they're not going to be meeting. What do you make of that?
LIEBERMAN: I think it's a shame and a mistake.
And I gather the White House is saying that it's a scheduling problem. But this relationship between the U.S. and Israel is one of the closest in the world. It's one of our closest allies.
And obviously it is a critical time in that relationship because of the Iranian nuclear weapons development program. I really would appeal to President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu to not let schedule get in the way. They've got to find a way to sit down and talk face to face with each other either in Washington or New York when Prime Minister Netanyahu is in America for the General Assembly session.
It would be nothing but bad if these two allies don't find a way to meet with each other when they're both in the same country.
CAVUTO: Yes, in fact, in the same building.
LIEBERMAN: Yes, in the same building.
CAVUTO: Senator, thank you very, very much. Good seeing you again.
LIEBERMAN: Thank you, Neil. You, too.
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